Unless someone suddenly gets cold feet, it sure looks like we’re going to have a presidential debate next week. Time for a little debate prep:
Presidential general election debates rarely have any significant effects on election outcomes. And this one — in June, before most undecided voters are paying attention, and with months of opportunities for new stories to displace whatever comes out of this one — seems especially unlikely to move the needle.
To begin with, most voters are partisans, and they’ll not only vote for their party’s candidate regardless of what they hear — but what they hear, or at least how they interpret what they hear, will be driven by partisanship. On top of that, presidential general elections eventually produce tons of information about the candidates, their plans, and more, making it hard for the debates to stand out. That’s even more the case this time. As the Wesleyan Media Project’s Erika Franklin Fowler said about ads in this cycle, “advertising should be expected to matter less in a rematch between two well-known candidates.” The same goes for debates.0
It might look as though the debates will have mattered to November outcomes, even if they don’t.
Debates have produced short-term fluctuations in public opinion. They can also produce the illusion of change, because they can temporarily change which people respond to pollsters and which do not. Those effects wash out soon enough as the debate news cycle(s) end within a week or so.
There is another possibility this time. The national conventions and the fall campaign often function as cues to partisan voters who don’t pay much attention to politics (including those who think of themselves as independent voters but actually wind up voting for the same party time after time). The campaign basically pushes people back to where they were likely to be headed anyway. We don’t know exactly how that works, and it’s possible that a debate held before the conventions will begin that process, which would have happened anyway had there not been an early debate.
Of course, things could be different.
All of the above is likely if the normal rules and reactions apply. But it’s worth mentioning again that we do have a lot of highly unusual stuff in this election cycle, beginning with a former president running, and running as a convicted felon awaiting sentencing and three more trials.
It’s also unusual to have the out-party’s campaign dominated by claims that the incumbent president is a drooling moron, and it’s quite possible that there are voters who are believe that but will be convinced otherwise when a more-or-less coherent Joe Biden shows up.1 More generally, neither of these candidates has a record of being a world-class debater, and neither has done one of these for four years so one or both could seem rusty or worse. Still, I’m pretty skeptical that even a large debate “win” would really affect the November results.
It’s good that debates don’t affect election results!
Elections are not contests over who can produce the best zingers and deliver them the most smoothly; nor are they battles over who can structure a rational argument the best, or even which candidate can display the greatest mastery of public policy choices. So it’s actually a good thing that none of that stuff matters much. Elections are choices about which team of people will take office, which interests will be promoted, and which policy agenda and priorities will have more sway. Debate performance really doesn’t tell voters anything about that.
But debates can matter anyway
Representation is a process in which candidates make promises, interpret those promises after winning office, govern with those interpretations in mind, and then explain their actions in office in the context of the original promises. Those promises range from specific policy pledges to more general claims about how they will act, on whose behalf they will act, and even who they will be if elected.
And while politicians (and their allies) try to keep promises in general, they’re especially likely to consider some of them to be the most important — and promises made in high-profile events are often included in that group. This is also true of, for example, campaign ads and party platforms. The difference in debates is that candidates can’t choose the topics, and so normal candidates in normal parties prepare extentensive answers to questions on which they might prefer not to take so public of a stand.2 That’s a healthy activity. And the good news in this era of splintered media in which more and more voters might not even be aware that the debate happened is that this effect should happen whether or not many voters pay attention.
So, feel free to enjoy the debate or to skip it, but it is a marginally good thing that we’re still doing these events. Even if they don’t do and shouldn’t do what people think they should do.
Then again, Biden has repeatedly generated stories about being perfectly fine — most recently at his State of the Union speech — without having much of an effect, so who knows? Obviously it’s not going to convince Trump supporters, who seem prepared to believe that Biden is suffering from dementia but can mask it with (fictional) drugs which, for some reason, he apparently doesn’t use most of the time.
Normal candidates in normal parties perhaps not including Donald Trump, who rarely bothers learning anything about anything before speaking about it. Which in a way is a kind of promise he makes, too.